Tuesday, June 16, 2009

(I would have made the comments below to today's City Council meeting on its General Plan, but the mayor cut the time in half. I summarized instead. -Brian)

(UPDATE: The City Council protected Almaden Valley and mid-Coyote Valley, but not north Coyote Valley. So not too bad, but there's more to do.)

I want to address the suggestions in the supplemental documents for this item. The second Supplemental, from June 15, contains landowner suggestions to develop Almaden Valley and Coyote Valley Urban Reserves, and I think Councilmember Liccardo addressed this.

Developers have proposed in the June 3d Supplemental memo, suggesting that Scenario K be modified to add 10,000 residences to the proposed 50,000 jobs in North Coyote Valley. This is a bad idea, maybe the most environmentally destructive one in the packet. I would describe it as a "zombie idea," the walking dead version of the Coyote Valley Specific Plan that we thought we had been put down to rest in peace over a year ago. The proposal is really a stalking horse to get residential development and downplay jobs. All the reasons for not doing this became clear during the collapse of the Coyote Valley proposal and it shouldn't be revived now.

So what would be better? We suggest modifying Scenario K to remove the proposed 50,000 jobs from North Coyote Valley, based on the assumption that the Coyote Valley Research Park permits will expire without being used in 2011, as now appears highly likely. A certain number of the 50 thousand jobs could occur elsewhere, but mostly this scenario could be made much more politically realistic by somewhat reducing the total number of jobs and housing while keeping an appropriate balance. There is no need to expand the city outward and destroy this environmentally crucial area.

All the environmental and economic reasons for not developing urban reserves also apply to CV